2012 CBS Sportsline Cheat Sheet – League Strategy

One of the major hosting site for fantasy football since the 90′s CBS Sportsline is a likely spot where many fantasy owners cut their teeth in playing this crazy game. While I can remember the days of playing in fantasy leagues before everything transitioned on-line, many active people playing fantasy today didn’t start until sites like CBS were around to offer leagues for free on-line as people across the world logged on and played against one another.

Other hosting sites have come since CBS but they are still one of the giants in the industry. As such, they are a part of our four article breakdown of some of the larger hosting websites on the internet, and we will take a look at their standard league rules and strategy listed below.

Towards the bottom of this article, you will find a cheat sheet to help you and we will be updating this over the course of the summer (and in years to come) so feel free to bookmark this page for reference.

Please be sure to head over to CBSSportsline.com to entire a new league and to check on the accuracy of our information listed below, for more.

One of the unique qualities to CBS is their standard leagues tend to focus more on twelve team leagues where NFL.com, ESPN and Yahoo use a ten team format. I tend to like a deeper league, as I’ve found over the years, the deeper leagues tend to reward those of use that put the time in to prepare for a season more than the average Joe that shows up on draft day.

It doesn’t always work out, but tendencies are that the person that comes to the draft and has done little work, knows the basic stars around the league like everyone else, but as you get into the deeper part of the draft, they start to scramble for a draft selection and may hesitate to take an obvious choice because they aren’t sure why that player has fallen down the draft board; thinking they must be hurt or something.

This doesn’t work as much in an internet draft, because some of these “unprepared” fantasy owners are good at digging for information through the search engines and can find the updated dirt on a player fast. Still, the deeper the league, the better you can take advantage of the situation overall.

Strategy - As is the case with Yahoo, CBS doesn’t have a flex position on the roster and they require that you start three receivers. Not a fan of this personally, but they do have a deeper bench than any of the other main sites so at least you can stash a decent amount of depth.

This is important, and I would dedicate one bench option to a backup defense and a backup quarterback in a twelve team league. Look to the defensive options listed in the defense section below as good backups and top quarterback backups will be Carson Palmer, Jay Cutler, Ben Roethlisberger, Robert Griffin III, Andrew Luck and don’t sleep on Jake Locker even if he doesn’t’ win the starting job right away.

The scoring structure above is just about the same as the other three sites but again has one noticeable difference, in that they award six points for a touchdown pass while the others give you four points. Not here to endorse CBS over the other three, as I’ve played on all of these sites, but I do like the six points over four.

Particularly when you factor in that all four sites take away points for interceptions and fumbles. I especially don’t like a league with only four points for the touchdown and negative two points for an interception, but this is something to keep in mind when deciding the points’ structure you want to play in, whether you decide to go free or set up your own custom league.

When it comes to kickers CBS doesn’t have any negative points for this position by they are one of the stingiest for actual points. Depending on your point of view this can be a good thing and a negative, basically depending on your view of a kicker.

If you’re the type that hates that kickers are even a part of a football team, you might not mind fewer points awarded in your league, because it caps their ability to make a big impact.

On the other hand, you make like a league that rewords more, like giving more points for the distance kicks past 40 yards.

One of the more active leagues in terms of multiple ways to reward team defensive points. I’m a fan of this but I’ve also seen leagues that allow the defensive points to go a little crazy. Yes, you only have one team defense, but how much of an impact should they have on the outcome of head to head scoring when no one is going to draft one before the later rounds?

Non of these major websites tend to go overboard, but again, I do like a wide range of ways for your defense / special teams to make an impact. Perhaps that’s why I’ve become obsessed about IDP fantasy football in recent years but that’s another story.

Strategy -As will be the case in many leagues you will want to rotate defenses. Look to cheaper options like the Bills, Seahawks, Cardinals and Cowboys as good fill in defenses to use when your stud squad has a poor matchup.

Because CBS awards a decent amount for total yards allowed, you will want to find those matchups against weak offenses like Cleveland, St. Louis, Jacksonville and Miami as often as possible.